1903.] on Dictionaries, 351 



dictionary-making I have no time to dwell, and must confine myself 

 to the history of English dictionaries and their immediate antecedents, 

 in itself a long story, for " The English dictionary, like the English 

 constitution is the creation of no one man and no one age ; it is a 

 growth that has slowly developed itself arlown the ages. Its begin- 

 nings lie far back some 1200 years ago, in times almost prehistoric. 

 And these beginnings themselves were, strange to say, neither 

 English nor yet dictionaries." 



xlll my present audience have been at school ; probably all of 

 them, when there, made some attempts at learning some foreign 

 tongue. Most of them when they found a word in their translation 

 book difficult to remember, have written the meaning over it in an 

 unobtrusive form. The learned name for such an interlinear ex- 

 planation of the text is a gloss. The early monks were addicted to 

 writing glosses over difficult words in their Latin books. These 

 glosses were sometimes in easier Latin ; sometimes in their own 

 vernacular. Sometimes books, especially scriptural and service books, 

 were glossed so completely as to have a sort of interlinear translation ; 

 at other times only individual hard words at long distances were 

 glossed. Afterwards, collections of these glossed words, with their 

 glosses, were made ; these were glossaries. The earliest glossaries 

 contained the words just as they were found and copied down ; later 

 ones were re-arranged more or less alphabetically. One of the 

 oldest extant is the Epinal Glossary of the seventh century ; it has in 

 the page three columns of glossed words followed by their glosses, 

 mostly Latin, but a small proportion English. In later glossaries, the 

 English explanations more and more predominated, till by the tenth 

 century these formed one of the important foundations of Latin- 

 English lexicography. The other source was the formation, even in 

 Anglo-Saxon times, of short vocabularies of Latin words with their 

 English meanings, arranged in subject-classes, for the use of young 

 scholars. These, in course of time, were added to or incorporated 

 with the glossaries, so that combined they formed, by the eleventh 

 century, more or less extensive Latin-English Dictionaries. 



Then the Norman Conquest overthrew English learning and lite- 

 rary culture, and for more than 300 years English lexicography stood 

 still. But from the end of the fourteenth century English was again 

 in the ascendant, and many Latin-English Vocabularies were com- 

 piled, some alphabetical, but mostly arranged under subject-headings. 

 The fifteenth century made a great step forward by the production 

 about 1440 of the earliest English-Latin Vocabulary, the Promp- 

 torium Parvulorum of Brother Geoffrey of King's Lynn, followed by 

 the Catholicon Anglicum c. 1483. With the Renascence of Ancient 

 Learning such work rapidly increased. Sir Thomas Elyot published 

 his Latin-English Dictionary in 1538. Enlarged and re-edited by 

 Thomas Cooper, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, this became at 

 length Cooper's Thesaurus. J. Withall published in 1554 A short 

 dictionary for young beginners, arranged in subject-classes. The 



